Monday, November 16, 2015

Why Medical Doctors Should Learn Programming

Why would doctors learn from programming?

Its a wonder how medical doctors would spend more than 10 years studying diseases and medical stuff while it would only take one to two years to study computer programming.
As I made my hospital rounds this morning as a specialist in general internal medicine, I realized how we doctors are un-connected to information technology. Our charts are in paper and laboratory results are in paper. Laboratory results would have to be relayed by nurses through phone or mobile text. Imagine less-hassle it would be if there was an app connecting a hospital medical software which forwards data from nurses workstations to doctor's mobile phones, tablets or laptops. This would create less errors and the patient would be managed effectively. These are just some of the applications of information technology in medicine. Imagine also if doctors working on a patient would be in Slack, communicating and sharing notes before a complicated patient undergoes surgery.

After I made rounds, I opened my laptop and read about the uses of information technology in medicine. I stumbled across an articles in BMJ: "The clinician-programmer: designing the future of medical practice".

Here are some quotes from the article which are worth mentioning.

"Those with skills in computer programming have many opportunities to improve the way we learn and practise medicine. While such skills were once the preserve of computer scientists, some clinicians are learning to harness this technology for the benefit of doctors and patients."

"Beyond clinical practice, training and revalidation are now largely electronic, with the e-Portfolio, e-Logbook, and e-Learning modules replacing their paper counterparts. Effective training and revalidation software must be simple to access, high quality, and deal with feedback from users."

"Doctors are also taking a more active role in identifying clinical problems and developing workable solutions through programming."

So why not program? In the next few posts, I will tell you more about Python programming and its possible applications to medicine.

I have to go and see some patients in my clinic. Ciao!



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